Elly Williams’ Weblog

A UK university [Derby] is trying to get women to apply for a computer games programming degree…. making a special effort to persuade women that solitary hours in front of a computer screen can be good for their career prospects.

Acting programme leader, lecturer John Sear, said: “Girls do want to play games but no-one is making games for them.”

He said there had been some attempts to make, as it were, “pink” games specifically for girls, but with limited success. So summer schools were one idea to let young women see what was available - and that programming did not have to be all about “boys’ toys”.

So, let me get this straight… in order to make games programming more inclusive, less about “boys’ toys”, and generally more appealling you’re going to tell me that I can’t play with the boys, that I need my own games (specifically made and marketed for me) and that sitting in the dark on my own is good for my career!!??? No wonder there aren’t any games for girls, if the people at the top think this is in any way appealling.

BBC NEWS | Education | Women wanted as games programmers

No, really.

Fair View Junior School, in Gillingham, Kent, teamed up with the makers of Sim City, which lets users play around with computer-generated cities.

A special Medway version was created to include recognisable local landmarks.

Children use the game to learn about environmental and transport issues while redesigning their home town.

The education-by-computer-game is part of a Medway Children’s University course called Design A Town.

The four-day courses have been run at Medway schools since 1998. BBC

I’ve always loved the Sim City games (ever since I was little and had to go round a friends house to play because we didn’t have a copy) Every aspect from terraforming to laying out nice little strips of land to watching the little cars whizzing about. And it’s highly addictive because stuff always goes wrong. The fire station catches fire, the nuclear power plant blows up, people complain about you putting up taxes to build the schools that they’re complaining they don’t have (there’s a political lesson there… take heed) … and then just when you think you’ve got is sorted, aliens land and start zapping things.

While I there’s a great deal of value in teaching children about city planning/government/attack-by-aliens (yes children, if you want a National Health/Education Service, you’re going to need some money from somewhere) I have to say I’m not wholly sure where the value in a special version showing local landmarks is. Beyond the initial “I can see my house from here” gimmickry, surely the class is just going to elect to put a sewage plant on top of the headteacher’s house…

WARNING LINK DUMP AHEAD

After a slow period on BBC Tech News , there’s now a whole load of stuff.

• EU to launch its own web domain - “.eu will be up and running by the end of 2005.”
• Search ads fire up Google profits
• Papal hotmail address goes on sale - and other emails and domain too!
• ‘Simple games’ rule mobile charts - Tetris tops the charts - couldn’t have seen that coming!
• The Cult of Mac - The BBC voicing what the rest of us knew ages ago
• Review: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - “not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.” - I’m fearing the worst I’m afraid….
• Helpful users face virus danger - Another Sober variant

Amazon.co.uk is recommending that I buy World of Warcraft. It is also recommending that I buy it with EverQuest II. Because if your life has already been eaten by one MMORPG (incidentally, mine’s been eaten by this one for the last few months) what you really need is another one.

I don’t think I’ll be taking up that particular recommendation. There aren’t enough hours in a lifetime.

A couple of weeks ago OK/Cancel discussed the ups and downs of customisation on the web, with particular reference to Amazon.

Well, I’ve come across one area in particular where Amazon’s customisation (in the form of the Recommendations section) could do with a little work.

Amazon knows I own a PS2. I have told it as much. It knows I own and enjoy a number of games for PS1 and PS2. It knows I own and enjoy a number of games for PC…. I do not have a GameCube or an Xbox. I have never told Amazon that I do and I have not bought or wishlisted any games for either. So why does it recommend them? Surely one of the criteria which Amazon bases its games recommendations on should be ‘platform’ ….

There’s this quite interesting piece over on the BBC discussing the implication of next generation consoles for the games industry, which I meant to write about yesterday.

The main thrust of the piece is that games producers are going to have to rise to the challenges/opportunities presented by the next-gen consoles (PS3, XBox2, Whatever-they’ve-decided-to-call-the-new-gamecube-this-week) Any companies who don’t make the grade are gonna fall by the wayside.

The BBC article describes it as ‘a cull’. Personally I don’t think it’ll be anything like that dramatic. It took a while for a lot of companies to step up anything more than the number of polygons they were using between PS1 and PS2. So I don’t think it’s the mere implication of a new type of console.

What’s going to make or break companies here is which console they decide to back. There is going to be (you could argue there already is) an all out battle between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo - and if you back the wrong one, you might not be playing to a big enough marketplace.

About a year ago I got very excited about the PS2 version of “Nightmare Before Christmas. As I said at the time, it’s one of my favorite films. And I’d completely forgotten about it until yesterday during a conversation about Pumpkin Pie and seasonal pumpkin distribution in the UK.

After getting Simon very worked up (and then having to persuade him that getting a PS2 in the middle of his final year was a really bad idea) I looked it up on Amazon.co.uk.

And in a fantastic display of timing the game is not due out for Hallowe’en (as previously advertised) or even before Christmas (like in the name, geddit?) but in the New Year… so it’ll have to go on my birthday list…..

Today, following my little brother’s recommendation, I installed the demo version of Evil Genius.

It’s fantastic.

Most of the first twenty minutes of gameplay were interrupted by either me or Simon exclaiming “How cool is that!” and “Oh, Wow!!” and “Look! Minions!”

After most of the initial excitement had died down and I’d gotten used to the controls (playing Playstation pretty much exclusively for 4 months makes pointing and clicking rather confusing) it’s still a reeeally cool game.

Basically, you’re an Evil Genius bent on world domination who’s been in hiding for the past x years and you’re starting out afresh. It’s Dungeon Keeper meets The Sims meets Austin Powers, without the annoyance of Mike Myers ANYWHERE!!. You get a number 2, ridiculous henchmen, a design-your-own base in the side of a mountain, and many, many minions. Who you can have killed as a morale boost. And you can laugh evilly at prisoners. And that’s just in the demo version!!

So that adds another game to the list of those I’ve sold my soul to recently…

Martin and I were wincing at the trailer for I, Robot and commenting on it being “sort of ok” to kill Robots in movies and games… in the same way that it’s “sort of ok” to kill Zombies, Demons, Nazis, Aliens, Cyborgs, Terrorists, Scientific Experiments Gone Wrong….. the list goes on.

But as soon as you kill REAL PEOPLE (terrorists don’t count… they don’t qualify for human rights so they can’t be human….obviously) with REAL (meaning red) BLOOD… and heaven forbid if you can actually see their faces and expressions as you attack them at close range… then it’s inciting violence in the real world.

Personally I don’t see that there is much difference (in gaming) between hacking at a mutant with a crowbar and chasing after a person with a baseball bat. They’re both sick and violent and if one of these is going to incite you to go out and actually do it chances are the other is too… but if that’s the kind of person you are then eating tomato soup might have the same effect….

As Fatty noted earlier, a number of UK stores have withdrawn the Rockstar title “Manhunt” following the games implication after Warren LeBlanc (a 17-yr-old from Leicester) clubbed and stabbed a younger lad to death with a claw hammer.

Now, whether or not [insert entertainment genre of your choice] has an influence on violent crimes has been done to death and most people aren’t about to change their minds on the matter… but one quote got me waving frantically at my monitor (and I’m in a public place).

“I can’t believe that this sort of material is allowed in a society where anarchy is not that far removed. It should not be available and it should not be available to young people”

For a start… the whole point of an anarchic society is that nothing is banned.. so therefore the closer we get to anarchy (not that I’m condoning anarchy) the more things are allowed.

Also, to jump on the enragement bandwagon, the game has an 18 certificate, and 18 is considered adult in this country which means it isn’t available to “young people” it is available to adults (Unless the 18 denotes mental age, in which case we might all be in trouble)

But what really gets to me is that too many people seem to eager to place blame anywhere they can. If you can find an outside influence; games, movies, music, Marilyn Manson, TV, etc, etc ANYTHING that takes the blame off you the done thing appears to be to do so. I was always taught to “own up” and “accept responsibility for myself”. All this reminds me of Ben Elton’s satirical novel “Popcorn” (which has also been adapted for stage. The book ends with a list of people blaming each other for the preceeding events. In the end noone accepts responsibility.

Now that Sony have set a date for the unveiling of the next-gen Playstation (namely next year’s E3 in Los Angeles) we could be up for a treat in terms of new consoles.

Nintendo and Microsoft aren’t going to want to get left behind again on release dates (for fear of consolodating the Playstation’s existing lead in the market) so there is likely to be a whole load of hype from all parties going on in the next year or so in the build up to the unveiling(s) and the sale dates (which are still a big unknown).

I think it’s gonna be fun to watch.

I read this article a while back. Scott muses on how “casting caution aside seems to be an Achilles heel to most levels in action-based games.” Now, I didn’t think much of this at the time. I’m not a huge fan of FPSs - which is the main category to which this applies.

But I’ve spent quite a while recently watching Meri play Devil May Cry. After each stage in the game you get given a grade and how much you get to spend on upgrades for the next level depends on this grade. So, the better you do in one level determines how easy it is do well in the next level. And from the backseat driver seat the “all guns blazing” technique seems to produce better results than the “leave no stone unturned” technique - which is Meri’s preferred technique and can be quite frustrating to watch.

In contrast Meri and I have also been playing Quest for Glory V which, despite being about 6 years old, is good fun. However, this is somewhere where you have to talk to everyone. You have to solve puzzles and ask the right questions of the right people in the right order and it’s all very laborious. I can never be bothered with this and therefore end up relying heavily on walkthroughs very quickly. And of course once you start down that road it’s very difficult to stop.

So maybe I should play more gratuitous killing things games where I don’t have to be quite so dilligent. I used to enjoy them lots before someone came up with the idea of using the mouse and the keyboard at the same time, which I never quite got the hang of and my brother still gloats at me for managing to die on the training level in Half-Life on the PC. Maybe now I have a console I’ll be somewhat better off.

I meant to write this about a week ago when I was sent the link, but I’m being hideously disorganized since finishing my degree (woohoo!!!) and so have only just gotten around to it.

Anyway, this article discusses the relationship between how realistic an artificial human is and how attracted we are to it. The basic concept is that as a robot or animation becomes more realistic we get more attracted to it (a microwave compared to R2-D2 or C3P0 perhaps.) However there is a point where the gap between the robot/animation and a real person is so small that the eye focuses on what’s not there. This discrepancy is known as “Uncanny Valley” and facial expressions are generally the hardest thing to get (convincingly) right.

Given that the face has more independant moving parts to it in a smaller space than any other part of the body the complexity of getting an expression right is fairly straightforward. And given that many of these elements aren’t actually that independant at all and each reflects slightly differently on another, you have yet another layer of difficulty. Also given the range of expressions that can be created by really tiny movements and it’s hardly suprising that it’s apparenlty so easy to “just miss” an expression. And there are, of course, other factors.

So, what next?

Do we keep pushing for the potentially unreachable lifelike proto-human, and put up with the Uncanny Valley for a bit longer or do we opt for stylized graphics?

There’s a piece on BBC - collective talking a bit about games being adapted into films, with specific reference being made to the forthcoming adaptation of Metroid.

The basic thrust of the argument is that games tend to get mangled when adapted for film…. this is not a new argument. In the same way that films tend to get mangled when adapted for games, or books tend to get mangled when adapted to film or game. And I’m not even going to start on the mess that can happen when you start adapting comics (*cough* League of Extraordinary Gentlemen *cough*)

The way I see it, it all comes down to separation of style and content. There was a piece on OK/Cancel a while back asking whether style and content were really inseparable.

“Take a book for example. As a media, a book affords for lengthy prose. It is portable and its pages can be turned at the user’s pace. Once published its content is static unless the user marks it up, and physical pages afford dog-earring of the juicy parts. As a result of these characteristics, one writes differently for a book than they do for the web. A skilled author might take 400 pages to get things going in a book, but on the web, this just doesn’t fly. No one reads a 400 page anything on the web.”

So how does this relate to games and films… well, in exactly the same way. If you go to the cinema the longest you are probably expecting to sit there is about 3 hours - probably less. More is certainly an exception and probably involves Leonardo diCaprio drowning. However many games take that long just to START getting into the plot/proper action - and the same goes for books. So stuff is going to get compressed and rejigged and potentially quite horrifically mangled.

So is there an answer… well….as long as there are people who stick fanatically to the original, probably not. And lets face it, with video games the ones with a following (and hence fanatics) are probably the only ones that are going to get adapted.

“One of these days, someone has just got to make a decent video game movie. How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda?”

I don’t have time to write a proper piece at the moment so here’s a few links that Meri sent me during the week.

Mouse and friend - Two handed input particularly for drafting and graphics. (also on Slashdot)
I for one would love more detail on how this works… or even what it looks like, the only images of it have peoples hands in the way…

Game industry facing creativity crisis“The video game industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as aging gamers’ tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies…..With more and more titles chasing the success of their predecessors …. the industry is faced with a question more serious than rhetorical: What’s new?”

Gaming prowess in your pocket: The move towards handheld consoles.

First look at PSP software … and some interesting spec details: